Invader

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CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23

Copyright © 1995 by C.J. Cherryh

All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Micheal Whelan

Cover design by Miles Long

First Printed in: 1995

Dedication: For Jane

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»

T
he plane
had entered the steep bank and descent that heralded a landing at Shejidan. Bren Cameron knew that approach for the north runway in his sleep and with his eyes shut.

Which had been the case. The painkillers had kicked in with a vengeance. He'd been watching the clouds over Mospheira Strait, the last he knew, and the attendants must have rescued his drink, because the glass was gone from the napkin-covered tray.

One arm in a sling and multiple contusions. Surgery.

This morning — he was sure it had been this morning, if he retained any real grasp of time — he'd waked with a Foreign Office staffer, not his mother, not Barb, leaning over his bed and telling him
. . .
God, he'd lost half of it, something about an urgent meeting, the aiji demanding his immediate presence, a governmental set-to that didn't wait for him to convalesce from the last one, that he thought he'd settled at least enough to wait a few days. Tabini had given him leave, told him go — consult his own doctors.

But the crisis over their heads wouldn't wait, evidently
:
he'd had no precise details from the staffer regarding the situation on the mainland — not in itself surprising, since the human government on Mospheira and the aiji's association centered at Shejidan didn't talk to each other with that level of frankness regarding internal affairs.

The two governments didn't, as a matter of fact, talk at all without him to translate and mediate. He wasn't sure just how Shejidan had made the request for his presence without him to translate it, but whoever had made the call had evidently made Mospheira believe it was a life-and-death urgency.

"Mr. Cameron, let me put the tray up."

"Thanks." The sling was a first for him. He skied, aggressively, when he got the chance; in his twenty-seven years he'd spent two sessions on crutches. But an arm out of commission was a new experience, and a real inconvenience, he'd already discovered, to anything clerical he needed to do.

The tray went up and locked. The attendant helped him with the seat back, extracted the ends of the safety belt from his seat — and would have snapped it for him: being casted from his collarbone to his knuckles and taped about the chest didn't make bending or reaching easier. But at least the cast had left his fingers free, just enough to hold on to things. He managed to take the belt in his own fingers, pull the belt sideways and forward and fasten the buckle himself, before he let it snap back against his chest, small triumph in a day of drugged, dim-witted frustrations.

He wished he hadn't taken the painkiller. He'd had no idea it was as strong as it was. They'd said, if you need it, and he'd thought, after the scramble to get his affairs in the office in order and then to get to the airport, that he'd needed it to take the edge off the pain.

And woke up an hour later in descent over the capital.

He hoped Shejidan had gotten its signals straight, and that somebody besides the airport officials knew what time he was coming in. Flights between Mospheira and the mainland, several a day, only carried freight on their regular schedule. This small, forward, windowed compartment, which most times served for fragile medical freight, acquired, on any flight he was aboard, two part-time flight attendants, two seats, a wine list and a microwave. It constituted the only passenger service between Mospheira and the mainland for the only passenger who regularly made trips between Mospheira and the mainland: himself, Bren Cameron, the paidhi-aiji.

The very closely guarded paidhi-aiji, not only the official translator, but the arbiter of technological research and development; and the mediator, regularly, between the atevi capital at Shejidan and the island enclave of human colonists on Mospheira.

Wheels down.

The clouds that had made a smooth gray carpet outside the window became a total, blind environment as the plane glided into the cloud deck.

Water spattered the window. The plane bounced in mild buffeting.

Unexpectedly rotten weather. Lightning whitened the wing. The attendants had mentioned rain moving in at Shejidan. But they hadn't said thunderstorm. He hoped the aiji had a car waiting for him. He hoped there wouldn't be a hike of any distance.

Rain streaked the windows, a heavy gray moil of cloud cutting off all view. He'd arrived in Malguri, far across the continent, on a day like this — what? a week or so ago. It seemed an incredibly long time. The whole world had changed in that week.

Changed in the whole balance of atevi power and threat — by the appearance of a single human ship that was now orbiting the planet. Atevi might reasonably suspect that this human ship came welcome. Atevi might easily have that misapprehension — after a hundred and seventy-eight years of silence from the heavens.

It had also been a hundred seventy-eight years of stranded, ground-bound humans on Mospheira making their own decisions and arranging their own accommodations with the earth of the atevi. Humans had been well satisfied — until this ship appeared, not only confounding individual humans whose lives had been calm, predictable, and prosperous in their isolation — but suddenly giving atevi
two
human presences to deal with, when they'd only in the most recent years reached a thoroughly peaceful accommodation with the humans on the island off their shores.

So, one could imagine that the aiji in Shejidan, lord of the Western Association, quite reasonably wanted to know what was in those transmissions that now flowed between that ship and the earth station on Mospheira.

The paidhi wanted to know that answer himself. Something in the last twenty-four hours had changed in the urgency of his presence here — but he had no special brief from the President or State Department to provide those answers, not one damned bit of instruction at least that he'd been conscious enough to remember. He did have a firsthand and still fresh understanding that if things went badly and relations between humans and atevi blew up, this side of the strait would not be a safe place for a human to be: humans and atevi had already fought one bloody war over mistaken intentions. He didn't know if he could single-handedly prevent another; but there was always, constantly inherent in the paidhi's job, the knowledge that if the future of humankind on Mospheira and in this end of the universe wasn't in his power to direct — it was damned sure within his power to screw up.

One fracture in the essential Western Association — one essential leader like the aiji of Shejidan losing position.

One damned fool human with a radio transmitter or one atevi hothead with a hunting rifle — and of the latter, there were entirely too many available on the mainland for his own peace of mind: guns meant food on the table out in the countryside. Atevi youngsters learned to shoot when human kids were learning to ride bikes — and some atevi got damned good at it. Some atevi became licensed professionals, in a society where assassination was a regular legal recourse.

And if Tabini-aiji lost his grip on the Western Association, and if that started fragmenting, everything came undone. Atevi had provinces, but they didn't have borders. Atevi couldn't understand lines on maps by anything logical or reasonable except an approximation of where the householders on that line happened to side on various and reasonable grounds affecting their area, their culture, their scattered loyalties to other associations with nothing in the world to
do
with geography.

In more than that respect, it wasn't a human society in the world beyond the island of Mospheira, and if the established atevi authority went down, after nearly two hundred years of building an industrial complex and an interlinked power structure uniting hundreds of small atevi associations —

— it would be his personal fault.

The plane broke through the cloud deck, rain making trails on the window, crooked patterns that fractured the outward view of a city skyline with no tall buildings, a few smokestacks. Tiled roofs, organized by auspicious geometries atevi eyes understood, marched up and down the rain-veiled hills.

The wing dipped, the slats extended as they passed near the vast governmental complex that was his destination: the Bu-javid, the aiji's residence, dominating the highest hill on the edge of Shejidan, a hill footed by hotels and hostels of every class, a little glimmer of — God — audacious neon in die gray haze.

Witness atevi democracy in plain evidence, in those hotels. In the regular audiences and in emergency matters, petitioners lodged there, ordinary people seeking personal audience with the ruler of the greatest association in the world.

In their seasons of legislative duty, lawmakers of the elected hasdrawad occupied the same hotel rooms, with their security and their staffs. Even a handful of the tashrid, those newly ennobled who lacked ancestral arrangements within the Bu-javid itself, found lodging for themselves and their staffs in those pay-by-the-night rooms at the foot of the hill, shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers, bricklayers, numerologists and television news crews.

With the long-absent emergency hanging literally over the world, the hotels down there were crammed right now and service in the restaurants was, bet on it, in collapse. The legislative committees would all be in session. The hasdrawad and the tashrid would be in full cry. Unseasonal petitioners would barter the doors of the aiji's numerous secretaries, seeking exception for immediate audience for whatever special, threatened interests they represented. Technical experts, fanatic number-counters and crackpot theorists would be jostling each other in the halls of the Bu-javid — because in atevi thinking, all the universe was describable in numbers; numbers were felicitous or not felicitous: numbers blessed or doomed a project, and there were a thousand different systems for reckoning the significant numbers in a matter — all of them backed by absolute, wild-eyed believers.

God help the process of intelligent decisions.

The runway was close now. He watched the warehouses and factories of Shejidan glide under the wing: factory-tops, at the last, rain-pocked puddles on their asphalt and gravel, a drowned view of ventilation fans and a company logo outlined in gravel. He'd never seen Aqidan Pipe & Fittings from file ground. But it, along with the spire of Western Mining and Industry and the roof of Patanandi Aerospace, was the reassuring landmark of all his homecomings to this side of the strait.

Curious notion, that Shejidan had become a refuge.

He hadn't even seen his mother this trip to Mospheira. She hadn't come to the hospital. He'd phoned her when he'd gotten in — he'd gotten time for three phone calls in his hospital room before they knocked him halfway out with painkillers and ran him off for tests. He distinctly remembered he'd phoned her, spoken with her, told her where he was, said he'd be in surgery in the morning. He'd told her, playing down the matter, that she didn't need to come, she could call the hospital for a report when he came to. But he'd honestly and secretly hoped she'd come, maybe show a little maternal concern.

He'd phoned his brother Toby, too, long distance to the northern seacoast where Toby and his wife lived. Toby had said he was sure he was all right, he was very glad he'd turned up back on the job under the present conditions — which the paidhi couldn't, of course, discuss with his family, so they didn't discuss it; and that had been that.

He'd called Barb last: he'd known beyond any doubt that Barb would come to the hospital, but Barb hadn't answered her phone. He'd left a message on the system: Hi, Barb, don't believe the news reports, I'm all right. Hope to see you while I'm here.

But it had been just a Departmental staffer leaning over his bed when he woke, saying, How are you feeling, Mr. Cameron?

And: We really hope you're up to this ....

Thanks, he'd said.

What else could you say? Thanks for the flowers?

Wheels touched, squeaked on wet pavement. He stared out through water-streaked windows at an ash-colored sky, a rainy concrete vista of taxiways, terminal, a functional, blockish architecture, that could, if he didn't know better, be the corresponding international airport on Mospheira.